MySpace has teamed up with Fox International Channels (FIC) in an agreement under which the latter will take over management of local advertising, marketing, and promotion across a number of territories outside the United States.
According to new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, this is the first result of its international operational review, which comes a few weeks after the company gutted much of its operations abroad. Van Natta asserts that the new partnership will allow MySpace to further slash operational costs and effectively leverage FIC’s local knowledge and relationships.
Fox International Channels, obviously also owned by News Corp, operates 170 linear and non-linear television services, their websites and an international online advertising business in a number of Latin-American, Asian and European countries. Starting today, FIC will start managing marketing and advertising sales for MySpace in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Poland, Mexico, and Turkey, effectively keeping the troubled social networking company’s local operations and advertising efforts in these countries from shutting down altogether.
In my opinion, this is a necessary and logical move by Van Natta. We’ve earlier noted that MySpace laid off most of its staff in countries where it isn’t competing well against Facebook, and to me it makes sense to cut your losses when you’re in apparent trouble.
By effectively outsourcing the management of local advertising and marketing to another unit within MySpace’s parent company, the synergy can be mutually beneficial plus it allows the company to refocus most of its attention to the countries where it is still holding strong without suddenly losing whatever revenue came out of the countries cited above.
If it’ll be enough to keep the ship from sinking remains to be seen.